Motion Trends Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

We address the problem of efficient detection of destination-related motion trends in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) where tracking is done in collaborative manner among the sensor nodes participating in location detection. In addition to determining a single location, applications may need to detect whether certain properties are true for the (portion of the) entire trajectories. Transmitting the sequence of (location, time) values to a dedicated sink and relying on the sink to detect the validity of the desired properties is a brute-force approach that generates a lot of communication overhead. We present an in-network distributed algorithm for efficient detecting of the Continuously Moving Towards predicate with respect to a given destination that is either a point or a region with polygonal boundary. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approaches yield substantial savings when compared to the brute-force one.